This Old Man: All in Pieces by Roger Angell (review)

To live a "long and happy life" is one of those stock phrases with interchangeable parts: one might wish for a "long and productive" life or a "long and healthy" life or even the Trekkie motto to "live long and prosper." But what does it mean to live a long life, well after most of one's friends, colleagues, and loved ones are gone, and why do we desire it so? Born in 1920, nonagenarian and longtime New Yorker editor Roger Angell confronts the beauty and pain of this "long life" in This Old Man: All in Pieces, which Angell refers to as "a portrait of my brain at 94: a different serving, with good days and bad days in there, some losses and recurring afterthoughts right next to a midnight haiku, a fugitive great movie, a party conversation reborn."

Angell is perhaps the last of The New Yorker's old guard of editors and writers; his mother, Katherine White, was an editor, and his stepfather, E. B. White, a frequent contributor. As an autobiographical retrospective, This Old Man presents a sort of writerly memento of life in and around the famed and quasi-secretive magazine. Filling the nooks and crannies between Angell's longer features and articles are inter-office memos, cartoons from the magazine, notes for the annual Christmas poem "Greetings, Friends!", and letters to numerous writers—including a charming correspondence with the poet Philip Levine and a kindhearted rejection letter to Ann Beattie, in reference to a story where "no one here [at The New Yorker] could recognize these people; they don't seem to have any connection with real life." In his tribute to former colleague William Maxwell and the bevy of famous writers he worked with, Angell sneaks in his own philosophical convictions about writing and its tug on the human spirit:

I believe, rather, that their stories [those of Maxwell's authors] are the same stories that we tell ourselves, each of us, over and over, every day and every night, returning to our distant or recent past, possibly in search of happiness but much more often in the hope of finding an unexpected window or bend in the path there. We want our stories to come out differently, but they never do.

The assembled mass of essays makes Angell's collection feel part tip sheet—as in pieces like "Storyville," about his time as fiction editor for The New Yorker—and part history of the magazine, replete with tributes to men and women of yore: Harold Ross, Donald Barthelme, Edith Oliver, William Maxwell, and John Updike, among others.

This rosy nostalgia—many of the pieces have the candor and warmth and soft edges of a story told by one's grandparent—suits Angell's preferred subject, baseball, nicely. As a sport, the "national pastime" is ripe and romantic in American consciousness. There is great power in Angell's ability to recast many of the long-ago greats who were never immortalized by the advent of the video camera. One is "The Heater from Van Meter," Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller, nemesis and archrival to Angell's boyhood Yankees: "He'd glare in at the batter over his upraised left shoulder, kick his front leg straight across, and clamp down in late delivery and at the same instant, it seemed, the catcher was straightening up with the ball in his mitt again." Many of Angell's more recent pieces on baseball take a short form, often whimsical and nostalgic, such as a tribute to Derek Jeter after his retirement, as noted in "S'Long, Jeet" (a "Talk of the Town" piece), or recaps of World Series sagas in "The Best" or "Post Patsy," where "A World Series opening game always feels like a kid's first trip to Luna Park—a sunlit space, with good things happening all day."

Angell's remembrances, from Jackie Robinson to Vladimir Nabokov, fill the implicit obligation of one of advanced age—to be a repository of memory and...